That is a valid issue, but the flip side is that true competition ensues since monopolizing industries into cartels becomes pointless (which is our current situation). Such a system (income limits, not socialism) might sprout more innovation, as people try to get to the income cap unhindered by over regulation from bought and paid for competition stifling monopolists.
Socialism is not the best idea tho because it grands government too much leverage to social engineer. Any benefit within socialism would have to be constitutionally guaranteed. This is the same issue with UBI. Would need constitutional guarantee, or else it’s a liability.
UBI is another stupid idea. You can’t pay people more than the value of their work unless you steal from someone else. It would create a permanent underclass. Name a monopoly that isn’t government controlled in the United States. The last one I can think of was Bell Telephone. Innovation comes when someone has the vision to see its value, and then no one can hold it back. Except the government.
Not when the production wealth growth is taken from automation. For instance, if all production was automated, UBI would not only be easy create, but necessary. Anyway, I don’t want to tangent the thread, so you have last word if you want it.
Heh, speaking of automation, Musk predicts 1 billion humanoid robots by 2040.
Humanity paging John Connor…
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Your point is valid, but I invoke Wall-E and Terminator. I won’t have to live in that future, thank God. I wonder how many employees Microsoft intends to replace with AI?
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A few million with increasingly higher tax brackets (including capital gains) would curb a lot of the bad behavior… At some point when a company is losing 80% of every dollar they give to these guys to taxes, they might start putting more of it towards QA, R&D, better pay for the rest, or just lower their prices.
I think the problem with leveraging the tax system to rail these people in is that they can easily just pass it onto the consumers and employees. Not to mention offshoring with shells, etc. I really think capping income is the only solution. Not the most elegant, but the hardest to get around. Greed will always be trying to find a way.
That’s not how executive compensation works. CEOs get most of their money from stock options and they don’t pay taxes on it until they cash out. Something they do over a number of years to minimize or eliminate taxes. The tax laws are written by the people who need money to get reelected.
A lot of why they can do that right now is capital gains is taxed at like 15% and they can just use creative accounting to bypass the normal brackets. It’s a lot harder to pass along that wasted CEO income when the brackets actually include that stuff and most of it just goes to the government past a certain point. Make it 20 million a year even before most of it kicks in, it would still channel a lot more of company’s profits towards better things eventually. The brackets actually used to be that in the 1950’s and worked pretty well, it was only when they got lowered that you started to see CEO pay to regular pay at 1000+ ratios.
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CEOs aren’t the only people who benefit from capital gains. You’ll kill the stock market if you put caps on capital gains. Just as they destroyed family farms in favor of corporate farms with inheritance taxes.
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Maybe the current setup isn’t healthy… could be addressed in stages or have trigger limits where it kicks in. I would guess 50% maybe even 60% doesn’t benefit from the stock market at all, or minimally where changes would be welcome.
Modern day elites don’t fear the common rabble because unlike basically every other time in our past, the modern day affords them very reliable means of self-sufficiency.
They don’t need peasants farming their crops. They don’t need the coffee shops to stay open so they can stay awake during their morning rush hour commute. They don’t commute, because they don’t work. When’s the last time Elon Musk earned a paycheck by doing anything even remotely resembling manual labor?
They don’t fear torch and pitchforks because they have guns and rocket ships. And that’s even assuming you can rally “the 99%” into a cohesive militia in the first place. Most of us can’t even agree who should or should not be allowed in the same bathroom, and you want us to band together to save the world?
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To be honest, even me won’t give my $10 money away for free to strangers or acquaintances.
I liked it better when tips were actually given To Insure Prompt Service, as opposed to “well everyone ELSE has a tip bucket, sooooo”
Look at the state that Diablo IV released in. This was inevitable, they want to grow the Blizzard franchises and that requires letting go of the people who set these franchises back a decade.
Yeah. I don’t tip buckets just people.
I deem Microsoft’s decision as sound, and the magnitude of workforce reduction appears far from adequate. Let me first delineate the data:
Microsoft’s gaming-related departments currently employ approximately 7,000 individuals. In stark contrast, Activision Blizzard boasts a workforce of 15,000, while King, the producer and operator of casual games like Candy Crush, accommodates a staggering 2,500 personnel. This juxtaposition borders on incredulity.
Particularly within Blizzard, there exists an inundation of superfluous staff hired ostensibly to conform to LGBT sentiments. The recruitment of a considerable number of personnel, lacking in professional competence and seemingly engaged solely to address public opinion, undoubtedly contributes to the underwhelming performance of new releases, such as Diablo IV, and the lethargic and substandard updates to existing games.
The inefficiency of these hires is truly lamentable. The arrogance displayed towards the gaming community, especially by Blizzard, is beyond redemption. Reducing such an unwieldy scale, even through a two-thirds workforce reduction, does not seem excessive.
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same thing happened when EA sunk their claws into Westwood Studios the moment they got their hands on the C&C franchise they shuttered their building and moved in-house and most of the Westwood staff were laid off and with the exception of the remastering of Red Alert which ironically they reached out to the original WW staffers they let go to do project we haven’t seen a new C&C game since
